Nick Crucified

Nick Milani vs Rex Brody, Catalog 24 - Below the Belt! (MuscleBoy Wrestling)

Nick keeps his clothes on in this match. Some of them. Rex Brody hangs Nick on the ropes and punches him hard in the stomach. Nick as good as says I don't care. He says it with his face, not with words. Nick is the coolest guy in underground wrestling in part because he doesn't wrestle. He absorbs pain. He hands it back to the man who gave it to him. Or he harbors it, hoping to come back to it later and study it, find out what it means. He doesn't "sell," at least not in the usual sense. Even his grimaces express a kind of bliss. A Nick Milani match is not like other matches. There's no fury or shock. Nick is cool, detached, who knows? maybe serene. Nick is Gloria Grahame getting slapped in an old black-and-white movie and liking it. Pain is his way of getting high.

Nick is everything the stripper said in the movie The Wrestler (2008): "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." Or perhaps not, perhaps only part of that. Maybe just the parts "He was pierced ... he was crushed ... the punishment ... was upon him ... his wounds." His slim tortured body and pasty skin remind me of Velazquez's Christ Crucified  (1632), one of my favorite paintings even though I am not religious. I wouldn't even call myself spiritual. I have visited the painting twice at the Prado. Both times it was freezing water splashed directly on my heart. 

Anyway, Nick. Maybe I'm reading too much into him. It's something I enjoy doing: reading too much into things. In this MuscleBoy match, Nick epitomizes the impressions made only faintly in his previous matches - or maybe I have been slow to notice. To me, the "skills and intensity" mentioned in the catalog description of this match are mostly a matter of restraint. Nick doesn't mug for the camera. He has little to say. His eyes seem to look through  his opponent, instead of at  him. The eyes are uniquely sad - for a wrestler. By seeming to express so little, his face expresses everything.